Digital Projects

Dr. Mark Ravina

The Digital Projects unit will produce a wider array of dashboards that will advance student learning while providing tools and content for wider distribution. The shift to distance learning has highlighted the need for instructional tools that support active learning. Dashboards allow end users to explore a dataset through search boxes and pulldown menus and graphically display results. Dashboards are best known as a component of “business intelligence” (BI), which is a multibillion-dollar industry, but they are equally suited to a range of Japanese Studies topics, including the analysis of literary and historical texts, as well as social, economic, and demographic data.

Language, Literature and Technology

Dr. Kirsten Cather

This unit will give students the opportunity to digitally explore and model the fictional worlds and languages of Japanese literature and film. Projects may include the creation of digital maps of literary landscapes (whether the 10th century court culture of Genji or the futuristic settings of Murakami Haruki’s IQ84); developing interactive timelines that map texts in terms of both their production/reception contexts and their real or imagined historical contexts (for example, tracing Godzilla across its many transnational adaptations); or creating language games that tackle the linguistic and technological challenges of working with and translating Japanese grammatical structures and scripts.

Historical Games Design

Dr. Adam Clulow

The process of designing a game produces a level of familiarity with material that is not duplicated in typical college-level assignments. Crafting believable central characters, designing branching storylines, conceptualizing different choices for players and creating associated artwork all represent significant challenges that combine to drive student learning forward while giving them ownership over the final product. Games produced in this unit will explore key moments in Japanese history while developing content that can be used in a range of different classrooms. Games are published as part of Epoch: History Games Initiative.